Timber

Hello there, and welcome to this piece entitled "Timber".
Sometimes I like to walk up a nearby minor mound of earth called Albany Hill. It is located about a 1/4 of a mile to the West of my apartment. I've been going up there lately more than ever before. It feels good to walk up the gradual slope, I guess it could be considered a "workout", but any activity where I breathe heavily for longer than 5 minutes I consider a workout. Anyway, Albany Hill's proximity to my place makes it a great little post work adventure for me.
Once upon the hill, it is littered with hundreds of non-native eucalyptus trees. These trees always look so haggard; hanging and drooping, bark splintering off the trunks, leaves littering the ground, weird gaps in the spreading foliage. So I walk along this little path on the hill and just observe things. There's a big white 1970s looking cross on the hill that lights up during the holiday season. On it is incomprehensible graffiti scrawled with stuff like "John eats big cum wads this year of the monkey" ???? There are benches up there too, some face East and Some face west. They sit high and are also covered with graffiti and have names and dates carved into them. Sometimes I'll sit on a bench and smoke a cigarette, which subsequently makes me feel like vomiting after the heart-pumping climb to the top. There is also a crazy old swing on the hill, which somebody had configured by stringing rope around a thick eucalyptus branch, and then attached it to small plank of wood in which to rest yr butt. I swing on this every time I get to the top. The swing lunges me way out over the Western half of the hill and then snaps me back, almost ramming into the tree from which it hangs. It is scary indeed, but I feel the need to do it every time I go up there.
I always seem to be myself on the hill. There are hardly any people around when I go up there during the week. I like it for this reason; I can be alone for a short time amidst a teeming pool of life below. Even though the hill is far from being "beautiful", to me there is a certain kind of beauty in its wild and overgrown state. It seems forgotten, neglected, obsolete. I read somewhere that there used to be a dynamite plant on the Western side of the hill, and the eucalyptus were planted on the hill to provide sound dampening. Those days are long gone, but Albany Hill still remains.
This piece "Timber" is a monument to the hill. Without the hill, Albany would lose all of its character, it would just blend in with all of the other East Bay suburbs. I like to think of this town as special and unique, unlike anywhere else in California. And it is, so long as the hill stands strong and the eucalyptus trees waver and shed their messy leaves in the cool Pacific breeze.